


under exile, the constellations

by malapropism



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, First War with Voldemort, M/M, Marauders' Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-10
Updated: 2015-11-10
Packaged: 2018-05-01 00:46:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5185790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malapropism/pseuds/malapropism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It has been ten months and three days since Remus Lupin last saw Sirius Black. Neither could bear to stay in London, and luckily enough, work for the Order took them far afield. But one day, Remus receives a letter from Sirius that brings him back to the city, back to the place they had called home. And he waits.</p>
            </blockquote>





	under exile, the constellations

**Author's Note:**

> The first line of this story has been stuck in my head since last January. This is just a fragment, really, of a moment during the war, when very little was certain. Eventually, this story will be folded into my _home is where you build your heart_ series, which can be found [here](https://archiveofourown.org/series/88363). But since this moment was so clear in my mind, I went ahead and wrote it down, and I thought I'd go ahead and share it. 
> 
> The title is a line from "I'm an Outlaw" by Kurt Vile, off his recent album _b'lieve i'm goin down..._ , which I listened to a lot while editing this story.

It is war, and he daydreams. Dreams about better things, about _never-weres_ and _never-has-beens_ and occasionally _never-will-bes_ , but he doesn’t know much about that, yet. Doesn’t know that they’re doomed. Can’t know that, not for sure. He can’t possibly peel back the world’s skin to expose the meat of the future, like the unsheathing of a bloody fruit.  It is war, and he daydreams, but the taste of possibility lingers on his tongue and there are still things left unknown. Yet.

Now. He is lying on the floor of an empty flat; the wooden planks coated velvet-thick with dust. He stretches out with his palms upturned to the cracked ceiling. He is waiting.

It has been ten months and three days since he locked the door and walked away from this place for the first time, and the lights no longer work because he let the bills pile up unpaid and the water has gone dry because no one’s bothered to run the tap in six months, plus twenty days, give or take. 

_Take_. The other left one day, too, nine months and nineteen days ago, and he took everything that was not bolted down and he left it on the kerb.

_Give_. They are sixteen, when it happens for the fourth time. Once, an accident - twice, a coincidence - third time’s a charm. The fourth time: that makes a pattern. That makes it real. They are sixteen when he leans forward and fumbles with his scarf, fingers slipping into the wool and smoothing the fabric out, performing that small ritual, a straightening of the edges before knocking the world askew. A small ritual, a question. He asks for something and he gives it and he takes and so they fall together, easy as breathing.

The years pass and one day he realizes that all he has done is give, give, give, until there was nothing left, until the thin walls of their love couldn’t stand the emptiness, until it all threatened to fall apart, to cave in.

It is a statistical fact: marriage rates rise during wartime. A respite of the heart in the face of all that horror. As the bombs fall and the curses fly, mortal beings cling together, and they are no exception. They do not marry, of course, but they are no anomaly. They are young and in love and they are dying the slow, inevitable death of the boy-turned-soldier. It is only a matter of time, and they don’t have much time to spare.

War corrodes, and hate worms its way into the heart, and fear, that glutton, devours the body from the inside out, leaving the bones clean.

That day (ten months and three days and fifteen minutes ago, plus or minus a few heartbeats) dawns, clear and bright, so bright it burns, so bright it blinds, so bright it breaks. Their tiny flat - _a respite of the heart_ \- is now a battlefield. 

This is what they mean when they talk about the homefront of war. 

Words fly like bullets, like hexes. The walls crumble into dust, dust that cakes the floorboards and coats the tongue, thickening, deadening. The weight of it all.

_This is just what you do, leaving is what you’re really good at._

_Why can’t you trust me, for once._

_You’ve always got an excuse._

_This is exactly what you’ve been waiting for._

 

When their kind marries, they do not promise _’til death do us part_. They know better than that; they know that death is neither the enemy nor the end. They promise something much more fragile, much more sacred: _’Til we go into death, as we went in life: as one._

As they begin to splinter, as they begin to crack, as they become _two_ and not _one_ , the world unravels along with them.

  

It is war, and he is daydreaming, lying on the cold floor of the last place that offered him relief. He is waiting. Two weeks ago, he had received a letter, hastily scrawled in a hand as familiar as his own heartbeat: _Meet me at home, last of the month. I miss you. I want to fix us._   

His heart sprouted wings.

He had spent the last four months and twenty-one days living in a wet cave above a dark, stony mountain range in the highlands of a far-off country, tethered only by the thin thread of memory to the life he had once lived. War is a lonely business.

Early that morning, on the appointed day, he mounted a rickety broom and flew through the mist, over cold, barren land and dark cities, across rivers and seas and through shadowy forests. He flew without stopping, as the sun rose higher and higher, as the morning light burned off the dew and the birds began to sing. 

He was flying home.

When he finally arrived, he threw open the windows to let the light in, casting out the shadows that hung over the flat like a mourning shroud. Already decaying, after just ten months of neglect. (Although, if he was being honest, it had begun to decay long before they left it, each other.) 

As he waited, the sun rose to its highest point, and then it fell. He waited as the clouds began to darken the smudged windows, as shadows climbed the peeling walls. The night’s chill descended into his bones and the stars began to shine tiny holes in the fabric of the night sky, portals to the world beyond. The city below roared with nocturnal life, and if the echoes of raucous cheer were unusually boisterous, he couldn’t say, not after months in the wilderness. Everything sounded too-loud to him, even the rise and fall of his own breath.

The hours stretched on, and the voice in the back of his head turned bitter. He should have known better, should never have expected him to show, should be over him by now. So many _shoulds_ and _woulds_ and _coulds_ , so many _maybes_ and _what-ifs_ and _if-onlys_. Even after he had long since given up hope that he would come home, he kept waiting, fueled by that strange alchemy of stubborn, bitter love. He knew that the door wouldn’t open, that he had been let down, _again_ , but still: he stayed.

_He’s pulled off miracles, before, for me._  

_I’ll wait another hour, just in case._

_Just a little while longer._

_Just in case._

As the hands of his watch ticked into a new day, he stood up slowly, shaking the premature aches from his bones and stretching his fingertips toward the leaking roof. A part of him felt guilty, even ashamed, for having fallen for this trick yet again, for having waited for someone like Sirius Black. 

_He’s never there, not when it’s hard. Not when I really need him_.

He took one last look around the empty flat, their empty home, before he crossed the threshold and headed out into the new day. Remus Lupin did not yet know it, but while he waited, the world had ended and begun anew, and everything had changed, and the war was over, and it was November 1, 1981.

 


End file.
